David “DJ” Franklin

Position

Master in MEEN, Texas A&M, 2018 – 2020
CAST Lab

Contact Info

sirdj [at] tamu dot edu

Project/Thesis

I’m D.J. Franklin, and I started working in the C.A.S.T. lab during the summer before my senior year at A&M for my Engineering Honors undergrad research project, where I worked on system identification of the longitudinal dynamics of an autonomous RC car. After I graduated with my B.S. in mechanical engineering in Spring 2018, I stayed with the C.A.S.T. lab for my M.S. in mechanical engineering. I worked on the Hard Truck Platooning (HTP) project for my master’s thesis.

I made a 2D rigid body simulation of a platoon of 2 semi trucks in Simulink and simulated HTP using a feedback linearization control strategy. I guided a senior design team to design and fabricate a prototype tow bar, and with Mike Ashley’s help we ran a preliminary test on full-scale semi trucks to test the strength of the tow bar.

I briefly helped with the Polaris Ranger on the ARL project, and I’ve also worked with lidar on the AFC project. I set up the Ouster lidars on the Jeep, set up Cartographer to perform SLAM on the Jeep, and wrote a ROS node to generate a simple costmap from the lidar data as well.

Subsequent Position

I interned at Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio in their autonomous vehicles group during the 2 summers before and during my master’s degree, and I really enjoyed it, so I’ll be starting there full-time this summer.

Campus Life

I competed on A&M’s 21-time national champion archery team during my time at A&M, and I was on our 3-man team that won national champion men’s compound team in 2016!